Angola is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders

Wednesday, May 28th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallSub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Angola, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders:

It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north, and by desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated, rugged land that acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.

The majority of the 22 million–strong population live in the western half, which is well watered and can sustain agriculture; and off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oil fields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the “socialists,” the United States and apartheid South Africa backed the “rebels.” Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.

The Mbundu had the geographical but not the numerical advantage. They held the capital, Luanda; had access to the oil fields and the main river, the Cuanza; and were backed by countries that could supply them with Russian arms and Cuban soldiers. They prevailed in 2002, and their top echelons immediately undermined their own somewhat questionable socialist credentials by joining the long list of colonial and African leaders who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

The whole trick is to get the rest of the world to pay

Friday, May 23rd, 2025

In theory, Juliet Samuel notes, the dollar ought to be a medium of exchange like any other, only useful to foreigners who want to trade with Americans, but in reality, dollars, in the form of US Treasury bonds, have become the backbone of the world’s piggy bank:

The dollar solves a dilemma. When a country accrues lots of savings, perhaps because it sells huge amounts of oil or has built a whole economy around battery or semiconductor exports, it needs to store the cash. Storing it in the country’s own currency presents two problems.

The first is that a lot of these supersaver countries have volatile exchange rates because they are ruled by capricious, thieving dictators, or because their financial markets are very small so it’s risky to have all the money in local lira or whatever. The second is that if they convert their savings into local cash, they’ll push their exchange rate up, and that will make their exports more expensive until they become uncompetitive, killing the golden goose. This, incidentally, is how a healthy trading system ought to rebalance itself.

So they don’t let that happen. Instead, what all these governments and sovereign wealth funds (and a few rich families or pensions) do is buy US Treasury bonds. Treasury markets are big and stable, open to anyone and underpinned by the rule of law.

When the US was by far the world’s biggest economy, this activity didn’t affect Americans much. In fact, letting the dollar become so important gave the US exceptional power to sanction foreigners and to borrow, seemingly without limit. But over decades, and especially since China became a full-fledged member of the trading system in 2001, the US economy has become smaller and smaller relative to the rest of the world, while the savers have become bigger and bigger. We are now at the point where there are an estimated $7 trillion worth of bonds squirrelled away as reserves by non-US savers: $3 trillion in China, the rest in Japan, Europe, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Korea and Singapore. This has inflated the value of the dollar to the point where it is pricing American exporters out of the game. Products made using dollars and priced in dollars are just too expensive.

[…]

Back [during Trump’s trade war in 2018–19], the tariffs were not actually paid by consumers. As far as one can tell from the data, they were paid in two ways: first, US importers accepted lower margins on goods bought from abroad, and second, the dollar rose in value, boosting US spending power almost by exactly as much as Trump had put up tariffs.

Self-evidently, a rising dollar is not what a Trump White House would want if its aim is to revive American manufacturing. But this underscores a central trade-off not just with tariffs but with any solution to the problem of gargantuan trade and currency distortions: someone, somewhere has to pay. If Trump lets the dollar appreciate, then American consumers don’t have to bear the cost. But then American factories won’t recover either. So the whole trick, as far as US policy is concerned, is to get the rest of the world to pay.

If there is a grand strategy behind the trade war, which there certainly is in the mind of Trump appointees like the Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, it is an opening salvo in a struggle to fix the US trading position and to sort allies from enemies in doing so. Start with tariffs on everyone, let them feel the pain, then offer relief to those willing to help gradually deflate the dollar by slowly selling down Treasuries, opening up their own markets to US goods and agreeing to impose a tariff wall on China.

[…]

At the same time, domestically, the US could embark upon a massive deregulatory programme to cut production costs, pump more oil, clear away planning hurdles, cut payroll taxes and so on.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France

Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon had an ambivalent relationship, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), with the Jewish population:

On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).

[…]

This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.

[…]

He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).

[…]

He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.

[…]

Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.

[…]

The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.

[…]

Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’

[…]

‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’

[…]

On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.

[…]

In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.

[…]

There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France,

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Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country

Wednesday, May 21st, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallBy size, population, and natural resources, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country:

It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which, with its size and natural resources, makes it the leading regional power. It is formed from the territories of several ancient kingdoms that the British brought together as an administrative area. In 1898, they drew up a “British Protectorate on the River Niger” that in turn became Nigeria.

[…]

In colonial times the British preferred to stay in the southwestern area along the coast. Their “civilizing” mission rarely extended to the highlands of the center, nor up to the Muslim populations in the north, and this half of the country remains less developed than the south. Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system.

[…]

The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business. The offshore oil fields are mostly free of this activity and that is where the investment is heading.

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.

[…]

Most of the villages they have captured are on the Mandara mountain range, which backs onto Cameroon. This means the national army is operating a long way from its bases and cannot surround a Boko Haram force. Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles

Tuesday, May 20th, 2025

The Department of Defense is now squarely focused on China, Thomas Shugart explains, with deterring or defeating a potential invasion of Taiwan as its top operational priority:

The Pentagon’s strategy is likely grounded in denial—aiming to prevent the PLA from achieving its objectives in the first place, rather than simply responding after the fact. Reflecting this shift, the U.S. Army is undergoing a major transformation, moving away from some traditional maneuver formations and toward long-range fires, autonomous systems, and electronic warfare.

[…]

A war over Taiwan, if it comes, will not resemble the last one the United States fought. It will not be won by the kinds of small-unit, ground-centric operations that defined the Global War on Terror. It will be decided—perhaps before the first shot is fired—by which side can sense more, strike faster, and impose greater disruption. More specifically, it will be decided in the air, at sea, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. “Trigger-pullers” of either side may ultimately finish the war on the ground, but its outcome will have been largely decided—and in some cases predetermined—by “button-pushers” who control information, aircraft, ships, submarines, drones, and precision fires.

[…]

Two decades of GWOT reinforced the picture of a soldier (or sailor) in camouflage with a rifle and night vision, operating in villages or mountains. In fact, for years now even U.S. Navy uniforms have come to reflect that idea. But in a Taiwan scenario, the key variables will be control of the air and sea by air and naval units, supported by long range strike, resilient ISR, reliable satellite access, and spectrum control. Ground troops will still fight with courage, skill—and if necessary, sacrifice. Yet if China achieves air and maritime dominance, its landing force will be able to reinforce at will from China’s near-inexhaustible number of ground troops—and Taiwan’s ground forces, no matter how motivated, will eventually be overrun. Conversely, if the PLA loses control of the air and sea, its invasion force will be stranded, exposed, and defeated. Likewise, no matter how well-trained, well-equipped, or numerous U.S. ground forces might be, if China secures air and naval superiority in the early phases of the conflict, those forces will never reach the battlefield: reinforcement and resupply at scale across the Pacific will be impossible in a contested or denied maritime environment. Strategic access hinges on winning the air and sea fight first. Again, the outcome will have been decided at sea and in the air.

We have seen this pattern before. In the early months of World War II, U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippines fought with determination and courage. But despite their best efforts, they were ultimately forced to surrender—not for lack of grit or leadership, but because sea and air control around the Philippines had been lost to Japan. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, these troops were eventually subjected to the Bataan Death March, one of the war’s most infamous atrocities. Their defeat was not the result of tactical failure at the unit level, but of larger operational conditions set by loss of control of the surrounding maritime and air domains. It would take the United States years of sustained naval and air campaigning to fight its way back across the Pacific and reverse the strategic tide.

Similarly, on Guadalcanal the fight on land was intense and costly, but it was control of the surrounding sea and air that determined the result. In fact, more American sailors died in the waters around Guadalcanal than Marines and soldiers died on the island. The same war offers a reminder that the most dangerous roles were often off the traditional battlefield. RAF Bomber Command suffered a 44% fatality rate. U.S. submariners lost 22% of their force—one of the highest fatality rates in the U.S. military during World War II and more than ten times the average for the rest of the Navy. If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles, but instead fly aircraft and crew ships, manage satellites, operate kill chains, or maintain resilient communications.

The PLA understands this dynamic. In 2024, it announced a sweeping reorganization that created three new co-equal forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, and the Information Support Force.

[…]

The United States must demonstrate that even a well-planned first strike will not ensure Chinese success. This requires hardened, distributed networks, prepositioned capabilities, and personnel trained to operate through disruption.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low

Friday, May 16th, 2025

When Bryan Caplan‘s twin sons were about ten, they loved a videogame called Tropico, which makes you the caudillo of a Caribbean island, its sovereign ruler and economic czar:

As you play, you face constant criticism from the island’s political factions. If you displease too many of your subjects, you fall from power and lose the game. Game after game, the most vocal critics of my twins’ regimes were the Communists. Which led to a memorable conversation.

“Dad, I’m really confused about the Communists in Tropico.”

“How so?”

“Well, you’re always telling us how terrible the Communists are.”

Guilty as charged. My wife and her parents were refugees from Communist Romania. Reading books about mass murder and slave labor under the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao is one of my long-time hobbies. I’ve written several academic pieces about the economics and politics of Communism, including an encyclopedia article. And it is in my character to share my knowledge with the next generation.

True to form, I responded, “Yes, ‘terrible’ is right.”

“In the game, though, the requests of the Communists always sound so good: grow more food for the hungry; build better housing for the poor; give everyone free health care. What’s wrong with all that?”

Hearing this thoughtful question put a big smile on my face. I was so proud of my progeny. And an answer was already in my head. “Sons,” I began, “in life, there are many things that sound good but are bad – and many things that sound bad but are good. Suppose someone says, ‘The government should just give everybody whatever they need.’ How does that sound?”

“Good!”

That’s from the introduction to his upcoming book, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, which makes one central claim:

My central claim is that free-market economics should be rebuilt on the foundation of psychologists’ notion of Social Desirability Bias (SDB). Once you take SDB seriously, you realize that most alleged “market failures” are actually market successes, and most alleged “government successes” are actually government failures.

[…]

To repeat, the lessons of Social Desirability Bias are twofold. First: When you spend your own time and money, actions speak louder than words. Second, when you spend other people’s time and money, words speak louder than actions. Now consider: If everyone spends only their own time and their own money, what do we call it? Among other things, “the free market.” What about when people spend other people’s time and money? Among other things, “government.”

[…]

What exactly does brutal honesty buy us? To start, brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low. So low, in fact, that we can justifiably praise free markets because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad and criticize governments because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. “Good stuff that sounds bad” like: downsizing superfluous workers, hiring tens of millions of low-skilled foreigners, deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid to speed up drug testing, greatly curtailing end-of-life medical care, and leveling historic neighborhoods in San Francisco to build new skyscrapers. “Bad stuff that sounds good” like: free roads, free parking, free college, free health care, licensing medical workers, regulating prescription drugs, requiring building permits, banning recreational drugs, sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants, and ensuring a dignified retirement for every American.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 11 Comments »

Nobody must ever come in during the night

Thursday, May 15th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon gave his brother Joseph, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), for not getting assassinated in Naples:

Your valets, your cooks, the guards that sleep in your apartment, the people who wake you up in the night to bring you despatches, have to be French. Nobody must ever come in during the night, except for your aide-de-camp who must sleep in a room preceding yours. Your door must be locked from the inside and you should unlock it only if you have recognized your aide-de-camp’s voice: he should only knock on your door after having locked the one of the room he sleeps in to make sure nobody has followed him and that he is alone. These precautions are important; they’re not a nuisance and as a result they generate confidence, apart from the fact that they can save your life.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century

Wednesday, May 14th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Ethiopia is sometimes called Africa’s water tower, due to its high elevation, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and has more than twenty dams fed by the rainfall in its highlands:

In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.

As things stand, Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 96 million people, is a growing power. Cairo knows this, and also that, once the dam is built, destroying it would create a flooding catastrophe in both Ethiopia and Sudan. However, at the moment it does not have a casus belli to strike before completion, and despite the fact that a cabinet minister was recently caught on microphone recommending bombing, the next few years are more likely to see intense negotiations, with Egypt wanting cast-iron guarantees that the flow will never be stopped. Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive

Tuesday, May 13th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanArctotherium summarizes Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education and notes that the chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive:

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits (i.e., “Goodharting”). Educational attainment has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it has been aggressively gamed.

[…]

If you’ve ever spent time tutoring, attended a college admissions prep course, gone to a selective institution like Stuyvesant High School, or done STEM at a selective college, you might have noticed a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction. Not one of them mentions Asian immigration—except in the context of Asians being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.

Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it: Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented their daughters to maximise status.

[…]

This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation. (Sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but it is in fact destructive and wasteful.

[…]

Korean private tutoring schools or “hagwons” are infamous. About 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends for 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending so much time and money on wasteful zero-sum signaling have thus far failed.

[…]

About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and therefore has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling. Yet the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023–24 that banned people from offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring. Note that China also relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.

China and India are both infamous for cheating—to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators. (China now threatens students with jail time for cheating.) International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating, with common methods including impersonation14, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in vocabulary lists. The persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop when they enter the US, and indeed anecdotes from teachers suggest that recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings.

[…]

The SAT score gaps between every major race in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s (Native Americans have small samples), with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores—with one glaring exception. Asian-Americans have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead on average.

[…]

A remarkable 25% of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 versus 4% of white students.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

Religion is a kind of vaccination

Thursday, May 8th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon insisted, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), that priests charge no more than 6 francs for conducting the funerals of the poor:

‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty,’ Napoleon said. ‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’

I’m reminded of the famous misattributed G.K. Chesterton quote: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.“

Posted in Policy | 9 Comments »

Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Nile, the longest river in the world (4,160 miles), Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), affects ten countries considered to be in the proximity of its basin — Burundi, the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Egypt:

As long ago as the fifth century BCE, the historian Herodotus said: “Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt.” It is still true, and so a threat to the supply to Egypt’s seven-hundred-mile-long, fully navigable section of the Nile is for Cairo a concern—one over which it would be prepared to go to war.

Without the Nile, there would be no one there. It may be a huge country, but the vast majority of its 84 million population lives within a few miles of the Nile. Measured by the area in which people dwell, Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was never more than a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy—it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense—but it has never been a blue-water navy.

Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea, and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 percent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the United States, with concurrent costs.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

Where a man stands on the question of America’s economic relationship with China does not always predict where he falls on questions of military posture

Monday, May 5th, 2025

T. Greer divides policy debates on China into two large buckets:

One is centered on geopolitics, diplomacy, and defense; the other on trade and finance. I was surprised to find that these two dimensions do not map neatly onto each other. Where a man stands on the question of America’s economic relationship with China does not always predict where he falls on questions of military posture.

T. Greer’s Economics Matrix

Those in the right quadrants see U.S. competition with China as a race. Winning the race means being the first to occupy the commanding heights of the future global economy. The country that develops, deploys, and commercializes the next generation of technologies will seize these heights.

Those on the left two quadrants reject this framing. They believe ‘winning’ requires a broader industrial renaissance that revives American manufacturing, restores its industrial capacity, and revitalizes the regions left behind by the tech-driven growth of the last three decades. They argue that orienting industrial policy solely around emerging technologies reinforces the very conditions Trumpism was born in reaction to.

At the bottom are the skeptics. Those pulled towards this position have no faith in bureaucrats. Many distrust the type of person that staffs our bureaucracy (left leaning, academic, inexperienced, etc); others doubt whether it is possible for any bureaucrat, no matter how skilled, to manage the market—especially when this means picking winners and losers in a domain as uncertain as emerging technology. If venture capital cannot pick out winning firms in advance, why think that Congress will do any better?

Those in the upper two quadrants of my diagram have more faith in the administrative state. They are inspired by the developmental states of East Asia and successful defense-industrial programs of the Cold War. They believe those successes can be replicated in 21st century America. From this viewpoint the key bottleneck is not personnel but political will.

In the bottom right, we find the Dynamists—technophilic types who think the greatest obstacles to victory are overregulation, DEI mandates, and the weak ties between Silicon Valley and the White House.

Sharing their technophilia are the fellows in the top right quadrant: the Techno-nationalists. These folks often have backgrounds in national security. That experience biases them towards active government involvement—through defense contracts, R&D funding, and procurement—in “strategic” industries (this group also tends to be most eager to apply export controls on Chinese technology purchases).

On the top left sit the Industrialists. They hope to rebuild legacy industries like steel and automotive manufacturing with tools the Techno-Nationalists would reserve for things like semiconductors or unmanned vehicles. They are unabashed defenders of the full industrial policy suite, from tariffs to strategic planning.

The bottom left quadrant—the Trade Warriors—share Industrialist goals but reject the bureaucratic apparatus (and spectacular budgets) that full-scale industrial policy would require. Their preferred instrument is the tariff. These appeal to people who would like to reshore manufacturing while simultaneously hacking away at the New Deal. A tariffs-first industrial policy is entirely compatible with a shrinking federal footprint—USTR can run all of American trade policy with less than 200 people.

T. Greer’s Geopolitics Matrix

In the right two quadrants we find Trumpists who emphasize the fiscal, cultural, political, and even physical constraints on American military power. They describe America as a nation in both relative and absolute decline. Like Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, they believe that we must face these realities soberly, and adopt a national strategy that frees the United States from diplomatic and military commitments it can no longer sustain.

This logic is rejected by the optimists, located on the lefthand side of the diagram. They balance the constraints America faces with the manifest weaknesses of America’s rivals. They acknowledge the problems identified by the pessimists, but tend to describe these problems as self-inflicted. Inadequate defense budgets are not a law of nature, but a choice—with Trump in command America might choose otherwise.

At the top are hard-nosed realists. They argue that force is the foundation of international politics. They understand statecraft as the art of accumulating, preserving, and using power.

Those in the bottom quadrants do not find this view sufficient. They trace connections between the way American power is used abroad and political conditions at home. As the international order goes, the domestic order may follow. Individuals in these quadrants tend to believe that the American government should actively commit itself to strengthening specific cultural ideals—and see no reason why this should not be true in the realm of foreign policy.

In the bottom left quadrant are the Crusaders. This group generally describes U.S.-China competition in ideological terms. In this view the two competing regimes rest on incompatible foundations. In the long run there can be no stable accommodation or compromise between the two powers, as the success of one undermines the domestic stability of the other. As a general rule, Crusaders believe that in a globalized world preserving basic liberties at home means defending them forcefully abroad.

The Culture Warriors in the bottom right quadrant are the Crusaders’ opposites: to them, both the Washington foreign policy establishment and the ‘liberal international order’ are extensions of the liberal domestic order they reject. At best, foreign policy interventionism is a distraction from the culture war they want to wage at home; at worst, it erodes the very liberties that Crusaders claim to champion.

The top quadrants are more traditional. The Prioritizers on the top right do not share the Culture Warriors’ ideological objections to the international order, but they do think this order demands more from America than she currently has the capacity to give. They consequently argue that the United States must shed many of its international commitments so that it can concentrate on the problem posed by China.

The Primacists in the top left quadrant share the realpolitik language of the Prioritizers, but believe the Prioritizers do not take the connections between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as seriously as they should. They believe that America does have the potential power to manage global commitments—if only we can muster the will to do so. They believe that Trump is the only man capable of supplying that will.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

So the war did not pay for the war

Thursday, May 1st, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsWith the signing of Treaty of Pressburg, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the Austrian Emperor lost 2.5 million subjects and one-sixth of his revenues, making a lasting peace unlikely:

When Vivant Denon presented Napoleon with a series of gold medals commemorating Austerlitz, one of which showed the French eagle holding the British lion in its talons, Napoleon threw it ‘with violence to the end of the chamber’, saying: ‘Vile flatterer! How dare you say the French eagle stifles the English lion? I cannot launch upon the sea a single petty fishing boat but she’s captured by the English. In reality it’s the lion that stifles the French eagle. Cast the medal into the foundry, and never bring me another!’

He told Denon to melt down the other Austerlitz medals, too, and come up with a far less grandiose design, which Denon did (it had Francis and Frederick William’s heads on the reverse). There was a modicum of modesty still left in Napoleon in 1805; he also turned down Kellermann’s proposal for a permanent monument to his glory and had David destroy an over-flattering gilt model of him.

[…]

A report from the Grande Armée’s receiver-general in January 1806 showed just how profitable the victory at Austerlitz had been for France.25 Some 18 million francs had been collected from Swabia as well as the 40 million francs demanded from Austria by the Pressburg treaty. British merchandise was seized and sold across all the newly conquered territories. In all, revenue amounted to about 75 million francs, which, after deducting costs and French debts to the German states, left France nearly 50 million francs in profit.

[…]

War must pay for war,’ Napoleon was to write to both Joseph and Soult on July 14, 1810. He used three methods in a bid to achieve this end: straightforward seizure of cash and property from enemies (known as ‘ordinary contributions’); payments from enemy treasuries agreed in peace treaties (‘extraordinary contributions’), and the billeting and maintenance of French troops at foreign or allies’ expense.

[…]

Ordinary and extraordinary contributions produced 35 million francs in the War of the Third Coalition, 253 million francs in the War of the Fourth Coalition, 90 million francs of requisitions in kind from Prussia in 1807, 79 million francs from Austria in 1809, a huge 350 million francs from Spain between 1808 and 1813, 308 million francs from Italy, 10 million francs in goods seized from Holland in 1810 and a special ‘contribution’ from Hamburg of 10 million francs the same year.29 The savings made by the use of allied military contingents (253 million francs) and by despatching French troops to be billeted on satellite states (129 million francs), as well as a total of 807 million francs in ‘ordinary contributions’ and 607 million francs in ‘extraordinary contributions’ over more than a decade brought in a total of nearly 1.8 billion francs.

Yet still it wasn’t enough, because between the breakdown of Amiens and 1814 no less than 3 billion francs was required to finance Napoleon’s campaigns.

[…]

So the war did not pay for the war, but only for 60 per cent of it, with the remaining 40 per cent being picked up by the French people in various other ways. Yet these did not include the imposition of direct taxes on Napoleon’s strongest supporters – French tradesmen, merchants, professionals and the peasantry – except for the discretionary taxes on drinkers and smokers. Nor did it involve any direct taxes on middle- and upper-class incomes, even though Britain levied income tax at 10 per cent on all incomes over £200 per annum, an unheard-of imposition at the time.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic

Wednesday, April 30th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall The DRC is an illustration of why the catchall term developing world is far too broad-brush a way to describe countries that are not part of the modern industrialized world, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):

The DRC is not developing, nor does it show any signs of doing so. The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most underreported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars that have been fought since the late 1990s.

The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of approximately 75 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France, and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.

The people are divided into more than two hundred ethnic groups, of which the largest is the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree.

[…]

When the Belgians left in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.

The civil wars began immediately and were later intensified by a blood-soaked walk-on role in the global Cold War. The government in the capital, Kinshasa, backed the rebel side in Angola’s war, thus bringing itself to the attention of the United States, which was also supporting the rebel movement against the Soviet-backed Angolan government. Each side poured in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms.

When the Cold War ended, both great powers had less interest in what by then was called Zaire, and the country staggered on, kept afloat by its natural resources.

[…]

In 2014, the United Nations’ Human Development Index placed the DRC at number 186 out of 187 countries it measured. The bottom eighteen countries in that list are all in Africa.

[…]

The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.”

[…]

The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50 percent of the victims have been children under the age of five.

In recent years, the fighting has died down, but the DRC is home to the world’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War and still requires the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission to prevent full-scale war from breaking out again. Now the job is not to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because the DRC was never whole. It is simply to keep the pieces apart until a way can be found to join them sensibly and peacefully.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

What’s Really Wrong With Standardized Tests

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

Standardized testing is glorious, Bryan Caplan proclaims, but many standardized tests royally suck:

The worst prominent test is almost surely the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). About 9% of test-takers get a perfect score of 170 on the Quantitative part of the exam. A score of 169 puts you at the 87th percentile, and by 166 you’re already out of the top quarter. Most of the STEM majors taking the exam did the relevant coursework in middle school, so for fields that emphasize math, marginally lower scores largely capture not incomprehension but carelessness.

This is especially ridiculous when you remember that only top programs are highly selective. So when the focal standardized exam bunches all the top students together, the exam delivers near-zero value. At least in STEM fields, the point of the GRE is no longer to pinpoint the stars who deserve admission to top programs. The point is to weed out the manifestly unqualified. So the final cut almost has to be grotesquely “holistic.”

The regular SAT math is, by comparison, vastly better. Something like 1% get a perfect score — roughly one-tenth the share that get a perfect score on GRE math. But in absolute terms, the SAT still sucks. At least for STEM students, the problems are easy, so marginally lower scores again primarily capture carelessness rather than incomprehension. Since about two million students take the SAT, roughly 20,000 have perfect math scores — more than enough to fill all the spots in the Ivy League.

[…]

Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.

Out of all the well-known standardized tests, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) best satisfies these conditions. A perfect score is, bizarrely, 528. The fraction that gets a 528 in a given year is about .02%.

[…]

When your goal is to find the best of the best, the ideal test is so demanding that you get a big clump of scores not at the top of the distribution, but at the bottom.

At least one such standardized test exists: the Putnam Competition. As you’d expect, it’s a test of mathematical prowess. To call the test “hard” is a severe understatement: In 2025, the median score was 2 out of 120. Which is historically high! In many years, the median score is exactly 0 for the roughly 4000 test-takers, who are already highly selected. At the other end of the distribution, only five perfect scores have ever been achieved.

[…]

There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit. The first is to get rid of standardized tests entirely. The second is to go “test-optional.” But if these approaches are too blatantly corrupt, there is a third option. A stealthy way to pretend applicants are far more equal than they truly are.

Just use lousy top-coded tests.

[…]

Admissions to graduate econ programs could be greatly improved simply by requiring the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics exams. They’re flawed tests, but if you can’t get 5’s on both, you’re not ready for grad school. Indeed, graduate admissions could probably be sharply improved across the board if programs required 5’s on all subject-relevant APs. Would-be historians should have 5’s on the U.S., European, and world history APs just to apply, and would-be literature professors should have 5’s on English literature and language.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

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